I guess you forgot Obama is not the outsider you think he his.
He has been friends with some of the most well connected idividuals in D.C for a long time and he has been living in D.C for
the last four years. I know you are intelligent but your emotions have blinded you from the facts.
Do you know UFO exists and that the Clintons were kept in the dark.
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This is apparently what Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson was referring to Wednesday when he said that the source of the current crisis went way beyond a lack of regulation and other mistakes. The real problem, Paulson suggested, must be traced to the nature of the grand post-cold-war bargain itself. American consumers overbought from other economies, and these economies in turn accumulated vast surpluses from which they plowed money back into Wall Street, thereby supplying profligate Americans with the finance to both spend as much as we wanted to as consumers and sustain ourselves as the lone superpower. Previous eras of world stability and peace had relied on workable international structures like the Congress of Vienna or the Bretton Woods agreements. Now the world has been relying on a global Rube Goldberg machine. As Paulson warned: "If we only address particular regulatory issues—as critical as they are—without addressing the global imbalances that fueled recent excesses, we will have missed an opportunity to dramatically improve the foundation for global markets and economic vitality going forward. The pressure from global imbalances will simply build up again until it finds another outlet."
This is what Barack Obama must now sort out. He will have to walk a razor's edge. He must confront the obvious—that overgrown multinationals like GM or Citigroup must be fundamentally restructured—without sending the economy into a further downward spiral. He must also accept that there are a lot more voices at the table than in FDR's day. The G20 summit planned for this weekend—probably George W. Bush's last presidential act, even if a lame duck one—will showcase how eager other countries are to influence the global economy (especially French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who declared recently: "Can we, those of us in the rest of the world, go on financing the deficits of a leading world power without having any say? The answer is clearly no."). And while the capitalist system isn't as broken as it was when Roosevelt took office—we seem to have avoided the worst mistakes that caused the Great Depression, mainly the massive failure of the banking system—the various bailout and stimulus plans offered so far still feel like desperate attempts to stabilize the Titanic.
Over the coming years the Obama administration must decide on some as-yet-undefined "third way" between untrammeled free-market capitalism and a new kind of government oversight that works—but which will never again become the statism that failed so miserably in the previous century. It will be Obama's job to act as a kind of cosmic broker between the end of one historical era and the beginning of another: the post-free-market era that he will now preside over. This may well be the defining task of his presidency, perhaps even more important than what he decides to do about energy, Iraq, Iran or "the war on terror." "We don't have a moment to lose," Obama said last week. Let's hope he gets it right, because failure will be very costly.
Editor's Note: This story was updated on Nov. 14, 2008
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